Therapists report surge in clients who describe feeling a loss of control they cannot immediately monetise
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Professional Help Sought for Situation Where Someone Else Made a Rule
NEW YORK — Manhattan therapists reported a sharp increase in new client inquiries this week following Mayor Mamdani’s executive order freezing rents on stabilised apartments citywide, with several practices describing a cohort of patients presenting what clinicians are calling Regulatory Distress Syndrome, the acute psychological discomfort experienced by individuals accustomed to setting their own terms who have encountered a situation in which someone else set the terms first.
Dr. Helena Kapital of the Upper East Side practice Feelings About Property confirmed the surge. ‘These are people who have not heard the word no in a professional context since the 2008 financial crisis,’ she said, ‘and even then the government ultimately said yes and called it a bailout. This is different. This is a no that appears to be staying. Several patients are struggling to process that the no is from someone they voted against specifically to prevent the no, and the no happened anyway. That is a grief journey.’
Legal Challenges Filed, Withdrawn, Refiled, Renamed
The Real Estate Board of New York filed four separate legal challenges to the rent freeze within seventy-two hours of the announcement, then withdrew the second and third after lawyers noted they were restatements of the first, refiled a revised version of the third as a new document, and released a statement saying the litigation strategy was ‘comprehensive and multi-pronged,’ which it was, in the way that firing at a target four times from the same position is multi-pronged.
Constitutional law professors at Columbia Law School said the legal challenges face significant hurdles given the city’s historical authority over rent stabilisation, a power that has been exercised since 1969 and litigated so many times that the relevant case law fills several shelves that landlord attorneys know from memory. The Housing Preservation and Development Department said it would defend the order and expects to win, which HPD officials said with the calm of people who have been to this particular court before and know where the good coffee is.
Tenants Respond to News With Unprecedented Calm
The approximately one million households in rent-stabilised apartments responded to the freeze announcement with the particular quiet of people who have been through enough housing news to know the difference between an announcement and an outcome. Tenant advocates said the mood at their offices ranged from cautious optimism to historical fatalism, with most people landing somewhere in the middle on a scale that has learned not to celebrate until the check clears. One tenant in Washington Heights, who has lived in her apartment for twenty-two years and has survived four attempts by successive owners to push her out through renovation, harassment, and paperwork, said she read the announcement carefully, twice, and then went back to making dinner. ‘I believe it when I stay,’ she said. ‘I have been believing things when I stay since 2004. So far I am still here. That is the only data I trust.’
The therapists, meanwhile, have opened a new group session for real estate professionals on Wednesday evenings. It is called Processing Change. It is held in a building on Park Avenue. The building owner raised the rent on the therapy suite this week. It was not a stabilised unit. Some situations contain their own commentary and need no additional observation from the narrator.
The Market Explains Itself
A landlord association spokesman held a counter-briefing this week in a Midtown conference room featuring a view of the East River that was, an attendee noted, considerably nicer than most of the apartments whose rents were under discussion. The spokesman said the market sets rents based on supply and demand, that restricting rents restricts supply, and that the solution to high rents is more housing, which is true, and which the city has been trying to build for twenty years against the organised opposition of the Real Estate Board of New York, which is the same organisation whose spokesman was explaining supply and demand in the Midtown conference room with the river view. This did not come up during the briefing. The tenant in Washington Heights was still in her apartment. The lawyers were still filing. The eggs cost $3.80. The city was, for the first time in a long time, doing several things at once that were in the same direction, and the direction was toward people who cannot easily afford New York, which is now most people, which is either the problem or the solution depending on where you are standing when you look at the river.
The freeze, meanwhile, applies to roughly one million stabilised units and does not apply to market-rate housing, luxury buildings, or units that have been deregulated through high-rent vacancy, a category that represents approximately 150,000 apartments removed from stabilisation over the past two decades through a process that Mamdani’s administration has asked the state legislature to reverse and that the legislature has asked to think about. The thinking is ongoing. The freeze is in effect for the units it covers. For the units it does not cover, the market continues to set rents in the way the market sets rents, which is upward, reliably, in New York, until something stops it, and the something is usually a crisis, and the crisis is usually the moment after the person who could afford the city last month cannot afford it this month, and that moment, in 2026, is arriving for a lot of people at once, which is what a housing crisis means when it becomes visible enough for a policy response, which is where New York is, and has been, and is only now beginning to do something about, slowly, incompletely, in the right direction.
More civic absurdity at https://www.thedailymash.co.uk.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism